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, bfhiU I lite, to be a ruler of life, not a slate, 
9 meet life as a powerful conqueror. " 

WALT WHITMAN 




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'God is the perfect poet 
Who in his person acts his oivn creat'ons." 

Browning. 



"There is no heroic poem in the world but is at 
bottom a biography, the life of a man; there is no life 
of man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of 
its sort, rhymed or unrhymed." 

T. Carlyle. 



uIJ}? 3^uftra nf dommnn Sife 

In one of his essays Robert Louis Stevenson 
quotes the saying that "a poet has died young in 
the breast of the most stolid"; and then adds, "It 
may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) 
bard in almost every case survives." 

Stevenson's correction contains much the truer 
statement. Not that each one of us could have been 
a poet in the ordinary sense, if we had tried hard 
enough. But every man, — or almost every man, — 
is born with some ear for rythm, some feeling for 
the beauty of ideas and the music of words, — some 
instinct for poetry and idealism; and though the 
search for knowledge, and the pursuit of wealth, 
and the cares of this life dry him up tremendously 
as time goes on, it is seldom that they can choke 
this side of his nature entirely out. 

Well do I remember the time when I had heard 
that there was such a thing as poetry, but had no 
knowledge what it was, when I stumbled, of all 
books in the world, upon Pope's "Essay on Man." 
I do not suppose I could read it now for wages. I 
do not know why I should have read it then. Per- 
haps it was merely the jingle in the words ; perhaps 
it was the introduction to a new set of ideas and to 
a truly great mind. Whatever it was, I read the 
"Essay on Man" straight through. I went about 
inquiring of this person and of that, whether he had 
read Pope's "Essay on Man." I was a trifle daunted 
by the fact that no one, — not even my own father, — 
appeared to have done so. I urged the neighbors 
to take up this task at once, though I never received 
evidence that any of them had followed my exhorta- 
tion. But at all events, I had come through, by way 
of this decidedly unpromising door, into a new 
world. 



"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, 
When a new planet swims into his ken, 
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, 
He stared at the Pacific." 



On into this new realm I traveled, without com- 
rade or guide, stumbling along as best I could, a 
good part of the time out of the road, or making a 
path for myself, — but in the path or out of it, all 
the time delighted and surprised. There is one 
old book in particular, — called, I believe, "The 
Household Book of English Poetry." It stood on 



THE POETRY OF COMMON LIFE 

the what-not in the southwest corner of the best 
room. Not in my father's house, — no such good 
luck as that ; but in the house of a farmer for whom 
I used to work during the summer vacation. I dare 
say the noon-hour would not have appeared to me 
the longest in the day, anyway; but what made it 
seem like a moment, — and yet a moment worth all 
the rest of the day, was this old green book. If I 
could have that identical book, now, on my study 
shelf, I should feel as if my oldest and best friend 
had come to see me. 

I have diligently searched my memory of a pe- 
riod somewhat later in my life, and I can not recall 
that any lesson in college, nor any approaching 
examination, nor any other crisis in my educational 
career, ever kept me up beyond a seemly hour at 
night. But I do well remember the hours I spent, 
on into the wee-small, with Robert Burns, and how 
next day, with my "Gallic War" open in my hand 
and the teacher looking straight at me, the only 
things that would seem to run through my head 
were, "Highland Mary" and "Ye banks and braes 
o' Bonny Doon." It is probably a pity, the things 
I did not learn in college, because I was forever 
wandering around in this imaginary realm; and yet 
sometimes I wonder whether any man ought to be 
called an educated man who has not by one path 
or another found his way out into this wonderful 
world of the imagination and the feelings. 

But though there is this particular period of a 
man's life when the poetical instinct in him is 
strongest, there is probaby more poet in the mature 
man than we think. I am surprised, often, to find 
how many business men there are, occupied and pre- 
occupied, and apparently of the earth earthy, who 
have a nook in the library corner with a favorite 
book of poems in it; or who carry about in some 
pocket-book that does not smell at all of the ideal, 
some copy of verses they have recently cut from the 
newspaper. I have always thought it one of the 
most characteristic and representative things about 
President Lincoln, that poor and uneducated as he 
was, harassed at home and perplexed abroad, he 
had his favorite poem; and often, in the cabinet 
meeting, or in the midst of heart-breaking reports 
from the war, he would say over the words of it to 
himself as if they were a sort of charm; — 

"O why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" 

Even the average man does not seem to be able 
to get along without something of this kind. 

6 



THE POETRY OF COMMON LIFE 

The old farmer takes down his spectacles from 
the shelf behind the stove, gets the family Bible 
from the cupboard, and reads; "Where wert thou 
when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, 
if thou hast understanding. Who laid the corner- 
stone thereof, when the morning stars sang to- 
gether, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? 
Hath the rain a father, or who hath begotten the 
drops of dew? Canst thou bind the sweet influences 
of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?" 

He reads, or so he supposes, for purely religious 
purposes, — because it is "the word of God." 

But really he reads it, and he loves it, because it 
is poetry to him; it satisfies that sense which was 
born in him when his mother sang her lullaby over 
his cradle and told him folk-lore and fairy-tales. 
And the next day he looks up, from the corn-field 
or the meadow, and it says itself over again in his 
mind, "Loose the bands of Orion, — when the morn- 
ing stars sang together." It is a light let down 
into his prosaic world from realms above, and helps 
him, as it was said of Burns, to 

"Walk in glory and in joy, 
Behind his plow along the mountain-side." 

Or he goes to hear a great preacher; — Brooks 
or Beecher or Spurgeon. And what he likes about 
him, tho' often he does not know it, — is the poet in 
him. He hears Spurgeon say, for instance, "Let 
me be buried somewhere under the boughs of a 
spreading beech, with a green grass mound above 
me, out of which primroses and daisies peep in their 
season ; a quiet shady spot where the leaves fall and 
che robins play, and the dew-drops gleam in the 
sunshine. Let the wind blow fresh and free over 
my grave, and if there must be a line about me let 
it be this: Here lies the body of John Plowman, 
v/aiting for the appearing of his Lord and Saviour 
Jesus Christ." Now what he likes about this is 
undoubtedly the religion ; but it is also, and equally, 
the poetry. 

As the poetry of common life is not always in 
rhyme, so it is not always in books of any kind, nor 
in concert halls, nor in great assemblies swayed by 
the orator's voice. The larger part of it, in fact, the 
average man must read from one of those two great 
volumes which God has placed at every man's el- 
bow, the book of nature and the book of human life. 
He sees the clouds floating above him like huge 
navies upon an open sea ; he hears the rain upon the 
roof at night; he wanders out, of a Sunday after- 



THE POETRY OF COMMON LIFE 

noon, into the fields, and sniffs the air that comes 
across the meadows, — and it is all poetry to him. 
Not the poetry of mere words, but the larger, purer, 
stronger poetry of nature. It takes him back to 
other meadows, over which he walked in years long 
gone. It sets his heart to singing old tunes. For 

"Ever upon this stage," as Walt Whitman says, 
"Is acted God's calm, annual drama, 

Gorgeous processions, songs of birds, 

Sunrise, that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul, 

The heaving sea, the vi^aves upon the shore, 

The countless armies of the grass, 

The scenery of the snows, the winds' free orchestra," — 

this is the poetry which God has written, and which 
he writes afresh every year; 

"The green grass is bowing 

The morning wind is in it, 
■'Tis a tune worth the knowing 

The' it change every minute." 

This is the rythm, and the beauty, and the swing, 
of which the poetry of words is a feeble imitation; 
— and this poetry every man of us may read; it is 
the poetry of common people. 

And side by side with this volume of nature, 
there stands the volume, from the same author, of 
human life. You look out of the car window, and 
see the cottage at the side of the road, — the grass 
neatly cut, the whitewashed fence, the children play- 
ing on the porch. Or you look up a little higher 
on the hillside, and see the "Farm Picture;" 

"Through the ample open door of the peaceful country 
barn, 
A sunlit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding: 
And haze, and vista, and the far horizon fading away." 

You watch your daughter as she grows taller, and 
slenderer and more like her mother. You go past 
the school-yard when the children are playing at 
recess, and there is your own boy kicking around 
among the rest, and you could pick him out from 
all of them a mile away. You sit down of an even- 
ing, and think of one who believed in you when 
there was not much of you to believe in, whose con- 
fidence in you made you whatever you are, who is 
perhaps still plodding along the pathway of life by 
your side, or possibly gone from you to leave you 
poorer, and yet richer, as long as you live. You 
think of the years that have gone over your head 
since you made your first serious plans in life, — of 
the disappointments and the sorrows, and of the 
joys and satisfactions in which they have been 
drowned; and through it all you hear a refrain 



THE POETRY OF COMMON LIFE 

which your ear can not mistake, and it is poetry to 
you. Not your own life alone, of course, — that by 
itself is only a line, perhaps only a word; but your 
life as it has fallen into the current of life about it 
and moved on in symmetry and meaning toward 
the end. There is some pathos in it to be sure, as 
there is in all good poetry. There are some things 
whose meaning is illusive and obscure. There are 
passages which, if they stood alone, would be not 
merely prose, but such prose as you must always 
be ashamed of. But coming out above all these, is 
the harmony of your spirit with the spirits of others; 
there is the soul's deep question and answer; there 
is the mystery and the light on the mystery; there 
is the motion and rythm and power that belong to 
poetry. It is out of this volume, — this book of 
common life, — that the common man must read. 

Far and away above any of these things, how- 
ever, the poetry of common life finds its supreme 
expression in religion. I do not refer merely to the 
fact that religion always creates a poetry of its own. 
and that this poetry is usually the best in all liter- 
ature. This indeed is true. I refer to the fact, that 
the only interpretation which can turn our common 
human life into poetry is the interpretation given 
to it by religion. Let human life be merely what 
natural science declares it to be, or only what the 
actual experience of many of us finds it, and it is a 
decidedly prosaic thing. But let it be, what religion 
has always declared it to be, an effluence of the 
divine life, a real, though partial and stammering 
utterance of an infinite meaning, and one can catch 
even in its imperfect and unfinished sentences the 
note of a true poetry. So it is that all the great 
poets, practically, have been religious men. Their 
religion has brought them to poetry, and their poet- 
ry has brought them to religion. 

For God is not merely an infinite conscience or 
an infinite power. He is also infinite beauty and 
joy, — light of all light, meaning of all meaning, wis- 
dom of all wisdom, — the Poet whose work began 
with the history of the universe, who wrote first 
in the star-dust, and scattered hither and yonder a 
verse in the infinite reaches of space until his words 
filled the heavens, and who now and forever utters 
his word of beauty and joy and love in "the human 
heart by which we live." Know this Poet; catch 
His spirit; look at the books of Nature and Human 
Life through the eyes of Him who wrote them, and 
read the drama of your own life to the end. 



Wl^at l^topU fito 3Far 






"How good is man's life, the mere living I 

how at to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses 
forever in joy." 

Brownikc. 



"The best portion of a good man's life, — 
His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness 
and of love." 

WcXtOSWORTH. 



^Ijat feopli Sine ^ot 

When a man goes for the first time into a big 
city, and instead of having the sidewalk mostly to 
himself as he does in his native village, finds him- 
self pushed and jostled and carried along like a 
drop of water in a great stream, his first and most 
persistent thought is, who are all these people, 
where did they come from, where do they go to, 
what are they all doing here? 

If one uses his imagination a little, and thinks 
of the people whom he has never seen, and never 
v/ill see, but who in similar fashion crowd the 
streets of London and Paris and Pekin; if he adds 
the people who pass back and forth over country 
highways and linger in the village streets; if he 
adds to these the people who are gone from our 
world now, but who walked these same streets and 
thronged these same cities, and dwelt in these same 
countries scores, and hundreds, and thousands of 
years ago, then all the more he wonders, and asks 
himself, "What do people live for?" 

It may be safely assumed at the outset, that 
there are very few people, or ever have been, who 
live entirely for themselves. Even the robber, the 
thief, the bank-wrecker, the man who sells his city 
or his state, never follows his course for himself 
alone. It is always partly for someone else, — for 
his wife and daughters, for his friends, for his rela- 
tives, — for somebody beyond himself. I am not 
sure that there is anyone so low down, — not even 
the tramp, the drunkard, the opium-eater, — but this 
is true of him. I am not sure but that, even as he 
rides on the bumpers, or shuffles off to take his sixty 
days, or hunts out under cover of the darkness his 
place of debauchery, there is always in his mind the 
picture of somebody beside himself, — some wife or 
child who waits for him, some pard who tramped 
the country road and counted the railway ties with 
him in other times, — some person whose life has 
been linked with his, to whom his heart-strings, 
torn and dirty as they are, are still in some way 
fastened. 

The more I know of men the more I must be- 
lieve, that of men in their senses, and outside of the 
gutter and the penitentiary, the only men who live 
for themselves alone are in the storybooks. There 
are many men who want what they ought not to 
have, and who get it in ways that are disgraceful; 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

but even such men do not want it for themselves 
alone. 

Of all the things that ordinary people do live 
for, the commonest, I think, is home. There are 
a few years when this object is absent from a man's 
mind. They are the years when he is not yet a man 
and no longer a boy; perhaps also the few years 
which come to him when his wife is dead, his chil- 
dren are grown up and gone, and nothing left for 
him to look forward to except the rest of the grave. 
But if you take off these few years at each end of a 
man's life, the one thing for which he lives is his 
home. 

This is not true of the exceptional man alone ; it 
is true of the average man. Stop the first man you 
meet on the street, — "rich man, poor man, beggar- 
man, thief, lawyer, doctor, butcher, priest," — any 
man, going along with preoccupied mind, thinking 
of the case he is to plead, the trade he is to make, 
the book he is to write. Get into this man's mind, 
down below this particular thing that is on the 
surface of it, and down there there is one picture 
that you will always find, the picture of a cozy- 
corner somewhere, of a woman sitting by the center 
table or before the fire, of two or three growing 
girls, and a boy or two that look like him. Ninety- 
nine men out of every hundred, say with Robert 
Burns, 

"To make a happy fire-side clime, 
For weans and wife. 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

I know, there are men who do not say this. 
There are also men who are saints at home and 
devils abroad. There are other things to live for. 
A man may work, and struggle, and save, and 
bring home everything he gets and lay it at the 
feet of his wife and daughters, and still be in some 
other respects not very much of a man. Neverthe- 
less this is the first thing for which the average man 
lives. Meet him wherever you will, find him in 
whatever occupation, or in whatever stage of spir- 
itual or intellectual development ; whenever you get 
under his jacket, whether it is a blouse or a tuxedo, 
you'll find this picture hanging on the wall of his 
heart. How can the world ever go seriously wrong 
so long as this is true? 

There are probably some people who live for 
money. As a rule, however, the men who seem to 
live for money, live for something else. They want 
the money only as a means for something beyond 

14 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

it. Or they want it merely for the fun of getting 
it. The fashionable wife and daughters of a rich 
man, do not live for money; they live to move in 
society, to travel around the country, to change 
their clothes, to be talked about, to stand at the 
head of the social column. The business man who 
has made his way from a poor boy, and has all the 
money he wants and more than he knows what to 
do with, works harder than he did when he was 
poor. People say, "What does he want of any more 
money?" He does not care for the money. He 
cares for the game. He is like a gambler. He lives 
not for what he can make, but for the excitement 
of the contest. He lives to beat the other man, to 
come out ahead, to see what he can do, to be in the 
world, and of it, and ahead of it. Most of the peo- 
ple who seem to live for money, really live for these 
other things. 

Many people also live not for any such visible 
things, but for the intangible thing which we call 
effect. They are idealists. They believe that ap- 
pearances are the only realities, and they live for 
appearances. 

When men, or more especially women, have sin- 
cerely espoused this creed, it is astonishing what sor- 
sows, what pains of mind and body, what troubles 
real as dirt they will endure, that they may keep 
this faith that is in them. I have known a woman 
who would rather see her boys go to the dogs, and 
keep up meanwhile the impression which the fam- 
ily has always made upon the town, than to admit 
that her boys are worthless and set about making 
them good-for-something. Not but that she loves 
her children, either. But when you get clear into 
the center of her mind, below all trivialities such as 
morals or religion or mere facts, there is only one 
question there, and that is the question, "What 
will people think?" Even when she thinks she 
measures her conduct by other standards, she really 
measures it by that. It's all she has. Her "esse" 
is "percipi," as Berkeley would have said; her es- 
sence is to be seen; and beyond how she and hers 
look to those who see her, there is nothing. 

There was a curious illustration of how far this 
living for appearances will take a person, in the 
case of a man down in Maine a few years ago. He 
was a lav/yer in one of the finest villages, and the 
first man of the town. People called him "Judge." 
He lived in a fine old house on the edge of the vil- 
lage, with spacious grounds. He entertained 
some, but not largely. He was modest in his 

IS 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

tastes generally. He had no desire to pose as a 
nabob, or to make himself better than his neighbors. 
All he wished was to stand as a gentleman of the 
old school, free, courteous, open-handed, benevo- 
lent. He did not waste his money. He helped many 
poor people. He did not have a single bad habit, 
nor evil associate. He had no family, and lived 
alone with his aged house-keeper. One of his pe- 
culiar hobbies was to carry a roll of bills in the 
pocket of his white vest, and wherever he was on 
Sunday, at home or away, to go to church, and de- 
posit some part or all of this roll on the contribu- 
tion plate. From these generally quiet, benevolent 
Mew England habits he never deviated in the slight- 
est degree. One Sunday he went home from church 
and shot himself. They began to examine his books, 
and found that for twenty years he had been steal- 
ing practically every cent of the money which he 
had been spending in these delightful ways. And 
the most significant fact of his whole career was, 
that on this very morning when he went home from 
church and shot himself, he had sat in his pew as 
usual, and as his father had sat there before him, 
and when the plate came by him, had with his cus- 
tomary simplicity and lack of display, slipped five 
new ten-dollar bills onto it. 

This man presents a perfectly clear case. He 
did not care for the money he stole, and used but 
little of it on himself. He lived for the impression 
he produced. He knew that there v/as only one end 
to his career. He saw it drawing nearer every day. 
He knew it might have to come anytime, and when- 
ever it had to come he was ready for it. But the 
thing he lived for was this impression he produced. 
So long as he could produce this, life v^as worth liv- 
ing. He would rather produce this impression for 
a few years, and then have his memory cursed by 
the people he had robbed, than to live in any other 
way and live out his natural days in honor. He 
might have lived twenty years longer; he might 
have left an honorable name and a host of friends; 
he might have done various other such things; but 
he would not have produced the impression. And 
the impression was the only thing he lived for. 

Among the people whom we all know, there are 
also many who live for their children. Here we get 
down to one of the commonest, but one of the deep- 
est, noblest and most significant facts about our 
whole human fam.ily. 

The people who live for their children are 
women, usually; but not always. Nor can it be 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

maintained that women who live for their children 
are always wise about it. It might be better often 
to let the children live for themselves. Sometimes 
a woman gets up at four o'clock in order to let her 
daughters sleep till eight; she washes and scrubs 
and irons that her daughters may look as well as 
anyone's, she saves her daughters' hands and her 
daughters' complexions and her daughters' feelings 
at the expense of her own; and the total result of 
the whole process often is that the mother is worn 
out in body and mind and the daughters grow up to 
be exacting and ungrateful, and generally worth- 
less. When self-sacrifice is so scarce, it seems too 
bad to throw any of it away. 

But in spite of this, here is where we show our 
deepest relationship, in both directions, — below us 
toward the tiger who will die for her cubs, and 
above us to God "who doth provide and not par- 
take." Nothing in the natural man goes deeper, or 
looks higher, than just this. 

And something of this sort, most of us have. 
Occasionally, no doubt, a man is without it. I re- 
member one old acquaintance, a respectable, edu- 
cated, but generally worthless man. His father had 
left him a handsome property, and all he had ever 
done was to collect the rent. I saw him once, after 
years of absence, and asked him how the world 
went with him. He told me about his business. I 
asked about his family. He said he had two chil- 
dren; looked sheepish, then paused, and said that 
sometimes he v/ished he had more. Then he paused 
again, and after a m^oment said, "But I'll tell you; 
I want somethin' left for myself." I had always 
known that he was mean; I had seen him in many 
small places, but I never saw him shrivel as he did 
when he said that. It goes far to argue a mistake 
in the evolutionary process, that from an ape who 
will risk her own life to save that of her babe should 
be descended a man who will talk that way. There 
are not many such, thank God. With a few excep- 
tions, every generation lives for the generation that 
follows it. "In the black hand of every coal-miner," 
said John Mitchell at the time of the anthracite 
strike, "there is the white hand of a child." We 
live again in our children. If we are even half 
human we also live for them. 

There are always, once more, a few men whose 
ambition in life is chiefly intellectual. The one 
thing they live for is to learn. They want to know. 
The "why" of the small boy has grown larger and 
more insistent with them until it is almost the only 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

question. Such a man was Aristotle, Newton, Kep- 
ler. Such men have been the great inventors, dis- 
coverers, thinkers, of the world. A small company, 
obscure, humble, unromantic, they have carried the 
torch in whose light the rest of us have walked. 

This kind of man is particularly hard for the 
ordinary man to understand. People see him dig- 
ging away in his library or his laboratory. He 
seems to be merely amusing himself. "What does 
he do with all his learning?" people ask. They can 
not understand that the mere desire to know may 
become a mastering passion, and that a man may 
live not to earn money with his learning, nor to get 
fame by it, nor to prop up with it the time-honored 
claims of the church or the state, — nor to do any- 
thing else with it, — but merely and solely to learn. 

Yet men do live for it. They live for it now, 
in what we call our materialistic age, just as they 
have in all ages. While they are alive we call them 
book-worms, fiends, freaks; after they are gone we 
call them scientists, philosophers, wise-men. There 
is no beauty in them that we should desire the life 
they live ; but they change the face of nature and 
the course of human aspirations, and in their foot- 
steps we common people unequally and often un- 
thankfully tread. 

In his "Religion and Philosophy in Germany," 
the poet Heine draws a typical picture of such a 
man. "The life of Immanuel Kant," he says, "is 
hard to describe; he had neither life nor history in 
the ordinary sense. He lived an abstract, mechani- 
cal, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet remote street 
of Koenigsberg. I do not believe that the great ca- 
thedral clock of that city accomplished its work in 
a less passionate and more regular way than its 
countryman, Immanuel Kant. Rising from bed, 
coiTee-drinking, writing, lecturing, eating, walking, 
everything had its fixed time; and the neighbors 
knew that it must be exactly half-past four when 
they saw Prof. Kant, in his grey suit, with his cane 
in his hand, step out of his house door, and move 
toward the little lime-tree avenue, which is named, 
after him, the Philosopher's Walk. Eight times he 
walked up and down that walk at every season of 
the year; and when the weather was bad, or the 
grey clouds portended rain, his servant, old Lampe, 
was seen anxiously following him with a large 
umbrella under his arm, like an image of Provi- 
dence. Strange contrast between the outer life of 
the man and his world-destroying thought. If the 
citizens of Koenigsberg had had any inkling of the 

18 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

meaning of that thought they would have shud- 
dered before him as before an executioner. But the 
good people saw nothing in him but a professor of 
philosophy, and when he passed at the appointed 
hour they gave him friendly greetings, and set their 
watches." 

Of such a man, it is plain that he lives to think. 
But it is equally true of many men who are neither 
philosophers nor scientists, nor great minds of any 
sort. A man may be a teacher of science and yet 
not care much to know; or he may be a cabinet- 
maker, or even a preacher, and yet his real interest 
in life be a purely intellectual one. Sometimes this 
intellectual animus will get into a whole people; — 
so John Watson recently declared that Scotland 
was not so much a country as it was a theological 
debating society. Certainly, for those who feel it, 
nothing, not even bread-and-butter, comes closer 
home, or is a more practical incentive, or more out- 
lasts the changes of life, than this desire to know. 

There are also the men who live for the service 
they can render to some "cause." They are not dis- 
coverers, but champions. They want to learn, but 
never for the sake of the m.ere learning; their real 
business is to fight. It may be a reform in govern- 
ment it may be an advance in scientific ideas; it 
may be a progress in religious beliefs; whatever it 
is, no soldier ever threw himself into battle with 
more zest than these men put themselves into the 
fight for their idea. 

The great names in this class are among the 
greatest the world has known, — Oliver Cromwell 
and William the Silent in government, Darwin and 
Huxley in science, Amos, and Jeremiah, Knox, 
Luther and Calvin in religion. 

But this service of an idea is not above common 
men. I have known, and do know, many men who 
live for it. It may not always be so great an idea ; — 
it may sometimes be a small one, and even a mis- 
taken one. I know men with whom home and fam- 
ily and money and appearances and learning are all 
incidental, who really live to fight the new theology ; 
they could say their "nunc dimmittis" with joy if 
they could only hear again the phrases they used to 
hear. 

But even when the idea for which a man lives 
is a small or a mistaken one, no man is altogether 
small who can live for one. Henry George won an 
international reputation, and deserved it, by put- 
ting his life at the service of an idea which most 
men believe to be mistaken. "Golden Rule Jones" 

i» 



WHAT PEOPLE LIVE FOR 

made his name a household word by the champion- 
ship of an idea that most men believe to be imprac- 
ticable. 

If I were to pick out two men, one from the first 
century and one from the last, who may stand as 
typical of the men of all ages who live for an idea, 
I should take two men unlike in almost all respects 
except this one, — I should take Herbert Spencer 
and the Apostle Paul. I should show you Spencer, 
getting hold son-.ehow of the great idea of evolution, 
and seeing with a marvelous insight akin to inspira- 
tion, its bearing upon the great questions of human 
society, and then, at forty years of age, sitting down 
to the task of elaborating this idea into a system of 
philosophy; sticking to this task, in poverty and 
sickness and isolation, for forty years until he ac- 
complished it; publishing every one of his books 
at his own expense, and absolutely without hope of 
remuneration ; and, when he died, leaving what little 
money he had as a fund for the continuation of his 
work, that after he was gone his books might still 
be issued to a public who did not care enough for 
them to pay for them. 

But by far the greatest representative of this 
kind of men I should take to be the Apostle Paul. 
An interpretation of Christianity absolutely his 
own; a task imposed by his own restless mind and 
eager heart; a life of toil and travel and privation 
and abuse, with home and family and friends and 
the religion of his fathers behind him; a victory for 
the name and cause he loved, such as few men have 
ever won, — this is what it means, at its best, to live 
for an idea. 

These are some of the things that people live for. 
Why, indeed, should any of us plod drearily along 
for board and clothes, when we might be servants 
of the ideal? Why lose ourselves in the mere hum- 
drum and monotony of life, when we might be 
fighting the battles of the infinite and the eternal? 
Why live merely to pay the rent, or get the house- 
work done, when truth and wisdom are crying in 
the streets? Let every man live for something 
larger than himself; for something that was here 
before he came, and will be here long after he is 
gone; for the truth that can not perish, for the 
wisdom that is from above, for the peace and hap- 
piness that make life good. This is that "Kingdom 
of Heaven" of which Jesus said so much, and which 
he himself lived, and died, to hasten. 



20 



Uitmtg in % l^ttBttd 



'Time's the king of men." 

Shakespeare. 



"Like as the waves make tozuard the pebbled shore. 
So do our minutes hasten to their end." 

Shakespeare. 



"Remember that man's life lies all witlun the pres- 
ent, as 'twere but a hai/s-breadth of time; as for the 
rest, the past is gone, the future yet unseen. Short, 
therefore, is man's life, aitd narrow is the corner of 
the earth wherein he dwells." 

Marcus Aurelius. 



SJtmng in tlte Prps^nt 

Hamlet describes man as a "creature of large 
discourse, looking before and after." This is, I 
suppose, one of his most marked peculiarities among 
the animals. The other animals look out upon 
time as if through a little peek-hole, and see the 
single section of it upon which they are borne along 
at the moment; man looks up the stream to see 
where it came from, down it to see whither it is 
going, and puts his paddle in on this side or on the 
other, according to what is ahead of him. And the 
higher man rises, on the road from savagery to 
civilization, the more this is true of him. 

But this which is man's peculiar prerogative and 
glory, may also become his temptation. Merely 
because he can look before and after, he may 
sometimes lose the art which the other animals have 
of taking each day as it comes. His large dis- 
course may prove a mere distraction to him, until 
instead of standing stoutly upon the duty and 
achievement of the hour, he may lean unsteadily 
upon the crutches of memory and hope. 

There are people, plenty of them, who do not 
live now, as truly as they live in the future or in 
the past. They use the present only as a vantage 
ground from which to gather up the results of what 
has been, or to get ready for what is going to be. 

Now the man who has not enough sentiment 
about him to spend an hour once in a while think- 
ing of the past, is greatly to be pitied. And the 
man who has not enough imagination so that when- 
ever he thus looks back he sees the old days 
through a haze of glory, is still worse off. "The 
thought of my past years," says Wordsworth, "doth 
breed in me perpetual benediction." So it ought 
in every man. 

It is a symptom, I suppose, of the poet who is 
born in every one of us, and who in some slight 
measure survives the passage of the years. This 
old home which I remember, among the trees at 
the edge of the village, — the big attic and the barn, 
and the boys that played in them, — and the trapeze 
behind the house, and the hollow beyond the school- 
yard, and the big hill, and forms and voices since 
seen and heard in many parts of the earth, — I may 
go through dismal scenes before I die, or through 
bright ones, but neither will ever make this recollec- 
tion any less sacred and beautiful. 



LIVING IN THE PRESENT 

"I have had play-mates, I have had companions, 
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days, 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother. 
Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling? 
So might we talk of the old familiar faces : — 

How some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some are taken from me, all are departed, 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

I can imagine that every man, who is not a pos- 
itive curmudgeon, may be in a mood to say once in 
a while: 

"Oh the happy days o' youth are fast gaun by. 
An' age is comin' on wi' its bleak winter sky; 
An' whaur shall we shelter frae its storms when they blaw, 
When the gladsome days o' youth are flown awa? 

They said that wisdom came wi' manhood's riper years. 
But naething did they tell o' its sorrows and tears; 
O, I'd gie a' the wit, gif ony wit were mine. 
For ae sunny morning o' bonny lang-syne." 

If this is sentimentalism, — and I suppose it is, — 
it is sentimentalism of a harmless and beautiful 
kind. If we may read poetry out of other men's 
books, v/hy not, occasionally, out of our own lives? 

Some people, however, make this a much more 
serious business. They not merely take an occa- 
sional dip into the past, but they live in it most 
of the time. Their minds are calendars of back 
years. Each month as it comes serves chiefly to 
remind them of what happened on the correspond- 
ing month and day ten years ago. I have known 
people who have moved twenty times in as many 
years, but who can not settle down for a fortnight in 
one place, without getting out the photographs they 
have carried with them for these twenty years, and 
placing them all around the room, — "the old familiar 
faces." You may meet them in Europe, or in Asia, 
or in Africa, and their first word always is, "What 
has become of So-and-So? When have you heard 
from Thus-and-thus?" Their favorite book is the 
autograph album. They browse here and there in 
the pastures through which they are now journey- 
ing; but their real sustenance is this cud of sweet 
and bitter recollection. Their religion is a mild 
species of ancestor-worship. 

A far larger number of people, however, are ad- 
dicted to the opposite vice, of living not in the 
past but in the future. They have the same dif- 
ficulty that the children have; they are always ex- 
pecting tomorrov/, but can never tell when tomor- 

34 



LIVING IN THE PRESENT 

row has come. They postpone the actual process 
of living, so as to get ready to live. When we are 
in school, we say, "When we get out into the world 
we will begin; we are only getting ready now." 
And v/hen we get out into the world we say, 
"When we are established in business." And when 
we are established in business, we say, "Pretty 
soon now, when we have made a competence." And 
when we have made a competence we say, "It is 
close at hand now; — when our boys are educated 
and our girls are m.arried." All the time getting 
ready to live; — imagining that on down in the 
future somewhere is the place and the time, and 
that here and today are only the prelude and the 
vestibule. We spend our lives in a vain expectation 
of a future that never arrives, and live forever in a 
tomorrow that never becomes today. 

But between the past and the future, is a little 
span which we call the present. The past we have 
in memory; the future in anticipation; but all we 
ever have in experience is this little while that we 
call "now." In this little "now" we have to live ; — 
to learn what we may of God's good world; to do 
what we can for ourselves and our fellows; to enjoy 
what we may, of God's good gift of life. We may 
look back for guidance, and ahead for warning or 
inspiration, but for what we do and what we are 
we can never get outside of this little hour that 
we call the present. Our memories and hopes may 
be elsewhere, but all our business is here. 

It is a simple deduction from this principle, that 
of the different periods of a human life, no one w.as 
intended as a mere preliminary or preparation of 
some period that comes later, but each one of them 
also for itself. 

You can not treat a boy as if he were always to 
be a boy ; but the greatest mistake you can possibly 
make with him is to treat him as if he were merely 
a half-done man. He may be dead before he is a 
man; and if he has not had his boyhood in the 
meantime, but only a preparation for manhood, he 
has not really lived. 

The mother hears her daughter practising on 
the piano, and thinks "what a fine player she will 
be." She looks over her school report and says to 
her husband, "Our little girl will make a splendid 
scholar some day." She teaches her of the various 
duties that life will surely bring to her by and by, 
and in her imagination she sees her the mistress of 
a fine house and the wife of a famous man, and she 
says, "How well prepared she will be for it all." But 



LIVING IN THE PRESENT 

all the time it escapes her attention that there are no 
roses in this little girl's cheeks now, — that she is 
not a little girl at all but only a woman half done ; 
and that whatever may or may not come to her in 
the future, she is not living now the life that belongs 
to her today. 

How many great musicians there are, who are 
great simply because their little feet were made to 
toddle from the first toward this one goal, — but who 
would give all their greatness now, and accept the 
lot of the common man, if they could only have had 
while it belonged to them the childhood that the 
common man enjoys. 

James Mill foresaw the great man in his boy 
John Stuart; for a great man he trained him, from 
the start ; and a great man he made him. But that 
cold, hard light that shines through everything 
that John Stuart Mill ever thought or wrote, — that 
singular limitation of a great mind, — that shrink- 
ing of a nature that could have been warm and open 
and sunny, — where did this come from? It came 
from the fact that he had no childhood. He would 
have been a greater man, — or failing that he would 
have been a happier man, which is much more im- 
portant, — if he had been allowed to be a common 
boy. The best preparation for manhood is a child- 
hood that would be complete in itself if life ended 
with it. 

In the same manner, the man who grows old 
gracefully is not the man who in his middle life 
spends his time preparing for old age, but the man 
who bears the burden and heat of each day as if 
it were all. Nature is wise. She will not have us 
living any portion of our life before we get to it. 
She leads us on quietly. And the only door through 
which we shall ever enter upon our future, is this 
commonplace door of the present. 

This applies, just as properly, to the work of 
men who are in middle life. Young men in college 
are often so worried about what they shall do when 
they get out of college, that they do not do what 
they ought to while they are in college. They are 
so anxious to succeed later on, that they do not suc- 
ceed now. This is one of the reasons why so many 
m.en wake up at forty or fifty to discover that they 
are not great men. They have always expected to 
be great, and always tried to be prepared for it ; but 
they have never actually been great. One clew to 
life is enough, if you can find it, and follow it. And 
one of the best and simplest is that expressed in 
the homely motto, "Do it now." 

26 



LIVING IN THE PRESENT 

And what applies to the work of life, applies 
equally well to that which is second only to work, 
and that is the enjoyment of life. "Business before 
pleasure" may be a good enough adage for practical 
purposes. But pleasure in one's work, and whole- 
some satisfaction now and all the time, is a much 
better principle. Life is worth to us what we get 
out of it. And we shall never get anything out of 
this part of it, except what we get now. 

This is not a plea for laziness, nor for the sub- 
stitution of recreation for work. But no sight is 
commoner than the sight of a man postponing the 
satisfactions and enjoyments of life, and proposing 
to take them all in a heap after awhile, but mean- 
time losing all capacity for them. He is like a 
barrel standing out in the sun, waiting to be filled, 
and meantime falling to pieces. In the book of 
life, you can not safely put the enjoyments all into 
the index, or the supplement. They must run 
through the body of it, and be found expressed or 
implied upon every page, or the whole thing is tire- 
some. They are like rest, and food, and sleep, of 
which no sane man wants a whole world full after 
awhile, but of which we all need a little every 
day. This day v.-ill never come to me again ; neither 
if I miss them this day, will the joys and satisfac- 
tions that belong to it. 



"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may 

Old time is still allying; 
And this same flower that smiles today, 
Tomorrow may be dying." 



Finally, this simple principle of living in the 
present, needs to be applied, more than to anything 
else under the sun, to the whole realm of religion. 

For it is in religion more than in anything else, 
tnat we are always playing off the future against 
the present. We look for a kingdom of heaven, in 
some other world. We hope for the reward of our 
goodness, and tremble for the penalty of our sins, — 
in some other world. We think that time will cease, 
and eternity begin, in some other world. We say, 
"not now," but "after awhile." "Then we shall see 
God," we say, "and know Him as he is; then we 
shall understand the mysteries of our lives ; then we 
shall come into his presence, — his immediate pres- 
ence; enjoyment then will take the place of sorrow, 
hope ripen into fruition, and heaven will come, — 
sometime." "Not now, but in the coming years;" 
"There is a happy land, far, far away;" — these are, 



LIVING IN THE PRESENT 

too much, the burden of our song and the substance 
of our spiritual hope. 

And, of course, in religion as in everything else, 
we must not live as if there were no future; we 
may even live for the future, if we wish to; but 
we should not live in it. What we need, and what 
religion is designed to give us, is the kingdom of 
heaven here. Eternity is only a present which 
does not wear out, and today is just as much a part 
of it as any other day will ever be. The other 
world is only the other end of this one. The 
best, and only, preparation for another life, is the 
right sort of life right here. We shall see God 
then, but we may also see him now. The reward of 
our goodness awaits us in the future ; it also awaits 
us, and is with us, today. The penalty of our 
sins will meet us there, it also meets us at every 
turn of the road, here. We are in the immediate 
presence of God now as much as we shall ever be. 
God is not waiting for us somewhere behind the 
veil, — in some other world. This world also is his 
dwelling-place. Let us know Him now. "Today, 
if ye will hear his voice." Above all shadows of our 
present life, shines today the one Source of light 
and blessing; and "now is the accepted time." 



aa 



^llt S^lt^ton of a (H^ntlf man 



'Seraphic intellect and force 

To seize and throw the doubts of man; 

Jmpassion'd logic, which outran 
The hearer in its fiery course; I 



High nature amorous of the good. 
But touch'd 7vith no ascetic gloom; 
And passion pure in snowy bloom 

Thro' all the years of April blood; 



And matihood fused with female grace 
In such a sort, the child would twine 
A trustful hand, unask'd, in thine. 

And find his comfort in thy face." 

In Memoriam. 



2II|f fipligum of a (gptttkman 

Among the ideals that the modern man holds 
before him, none is stronger or more attractive than 
the ideal of being a gentleman. The boy may begin 
with a very queer idea of what a gentleman is. He 
may revise this idea again and again. He may 
realize later that he has failed to reach it; he may 
even abandon it. But there are probably few men 
who have not intended at some time to be gentle- 
men. I do not know any criticism which would 
strike the average man more severely, than to have 
it said, especially if he felt there was some truth in 
it, that he was not a gentleman. 

As to what we mean by a gentleman, I suppose 
we should all be substantially agreed, though we 
might state our ideas in various ways. To the girl 
of seventeen, the gentleman is a man who is polite 
and deferential in the presence of young ladies. To 
the athlete he is one who bears himself honorably 
toward his antagonist, who can lose without being 
angry or win without being proud. To the business 
man he is one who treats his customers f?irly and 
his competitors generously. A boy brought up in 
business, and a man accustomed to life in the army, 
would probably define the gentleman in quite dif- 
ferent terms. So would the man from Connecticut, 
and the man from North Carolina. But ask all of 
these persons to pick out, from a hundred common 
acquaintances, a half-dozen typical gentlemen, and 
two-thirds of them would pick out the same identi- 
cal men. However our definitions may differ, we 
all know what we mean by a gentleman, and we all 
mean substantially the same thing. 

Not that all gentlemen are equally easy to re- 
cognize. One of the truest touches in the story of 
"The Virginian," is the length of time it takes the 
school-teacher from Vermont to realize that this 
cow-boy is the finest gentleman she ever met. So 
the heroine of Thackery's "Vanity Fair," respects 
Major Dobbin, and likes to have him around to wait 
on her, but cannot fall in love with him because he 
does not appear to her as a gentleman. Whereupon 
Thackeray remarks, "It must be remembered that 
this poor lady had never met a gentleman in her life 
until this present moment. Perhaps these are 
rarer personages than some of us think. Which of 
us can point out many such in his circle? Mj' 
friend, the Major," he continues, "I write, without 



THE RELIGION OF A GENTLEMAN 

any doubt, in mine. He certainly had very large 
feet and hands. He had very long legs, a yellow 
face, and a slight lisp, which at first was rather 
ridiculous. But his thoughts were just, his brains 
were fairly good, his life was honest and pure, and 
his heart warm and humble." It is a misfortune, 
undoubtedly, for a man who is a gentleman, not to 
have any of the ordinary facilities for letting people 
know it. But it is a much greater misfortune, and 
one under which some excellent people labor all 
their lives, not to be able to recognize a gentleman 
unless he is cut according to the fashion-plate. 

But what we mean by a gentleman is plain 
enough. We mean that a man must have a keen 
sense of honor. He must not be a coward or a 
sneak. He must not be a brag or a bully. He must 
be above anything mean or small, incapable of tak- 
ing advantage, or betraying a confidence. He must 
be perfectly sincere, with no veneer on him. He 
must respect himself. And he must have an equal 
respect and deference for all other people. He must 
be clean, inside and out. There must be no person, 
nor class in society, whose rights he would willingly 
disregard. He must have no contempt for anything 
except meanness. He should have manners, if pos- 
sible, which show that this is the sort of man he is, 
— genial, courteous, deferential. Some men indeed 
who are not gentlemen may cultivate these man- 
ners, just as some men may look wise who really do 
not know anything. Occasionally a man may be a 
gentleman at heart, for whom it is not easy to ac- 
quire these manners. I should go so far as to say 
that if a man cannot be a gentleman the very least 
he can do is to act like one. But in the long run 
that which is deepest in a man works most conspic- 
uously to the surface. 

Now I do not hold, though I have heard it af- 
firmed, that the gentleman and the Christian are 
one and the same thing. Christianity has been in 
the v/orld a great many centuries; the gentleman is 
essentially a modern creation. If we speak exactly, 
there were no gentlemen in the ancient world. 
There were soldiers, patriots, wise men and good 
men, but distinctively no gentlemen. 

If this seems to you a strange statement, take 
your Bible and look it through. What idea of a 
gentleman had dawned upon the minds of a people 
who pictured the first man trying to lay his own 
sins upon the shoulders of his wife? Or will you 
take as your sample of gentleman, Abraham, who, 
because Sarah was fair, and he was afraid some 

32 



THE RELIGION OF A GENTLEMAN 

Egyptian might want her, and might kill him on 
her account, handed her over to Pharaoh with the 
remark, "She is my sister"? Or shall it be Jacoo, 
who conspired with his mother to cheat his blind old 
father out of the blessing that belonged to Esau? 
Or shall it be David, who used the loyalty of his 
friend and subject, Uriah, to betray him, and to 
steal his wife? If there is any man in the Old Tes- 
tament who would naturally be described as a gen- 
tleman it is some wholly minor and unimportant 
character, like Jonathan, or like Boaz, who was kind 
to Ruth. Even the men you admire the most, like 
the prophets, you would not think of describing by 
the title of "gentleman." This is not merely because 
they were all subject to the same weaknesses as the 
rest of us; it is not because they were less than 
gentlemen; it is because that distinctive note that 
we find in the gentleman, even with his failings, 
is lacking in Old Testament characters. 

Or read Greek literature. The Greek heroes 
complain, they v/himper, they tear their hair, they 
abuse each other, they call each otner names, they 
cringe before their superiors, they are brutal to 
tnose who stand below them. They have their vir- 
tues, of course, but they lack precisely the virtues of 
the gentleman. Turn from any of these ancient men 
to the men you find in the plays of Shakespeare. 
You are in a different world. Here are men with 
tneir failings and their sins, but the heroes among 
them at least are gentlemen. 

For nineteen hundred years people have been 
Christians ; but it is only a few hundred years since 
we have had this particular type of man we call a 
gentleman. No, I do not hold it to be true that a 
gentleman is necessarily a Christian. 

Our modern Christian ideal has at least three ele- 
ments in it. These three elements are not only dis- 
tinct; they have come to us from wholly different 
parts of the world, and widely different periods of 
our history. 

There is first the idea of conscience, the strictly 
moral element; this we get from Judea. There is 
next the element of intelligence, or culture ; this we 
get from Greece. And there is a third element, and 
this is what we mean when we say a man is a gentle- 
man, — the element of honor, courage, chivalry ; this 
we get neither from Judea nor from Greece, but 
from the races of Northern Europe. 

The Jews lived in the presence of the invisible 
realities. They thought of human life as the ser- 
vice not of self, nor of one's fellows, but of the 

33 



THE RELIGION OF A GENTLEMAN 

higher power that lay beyond the reach of the eyes 
and the mind, but was revealed to the inmost and 
deepest soul of man. God became to the Hebrew as 
he did not to the ancient world at large, a perfectly 
definite, concrete, and personal power in human life. 
To enthrone in the v^orld, above all powers and 
principalities and possibilities, this moral element 
of man's nature, to identify this with God, and to 
purify and exalt this conception to the highest point, 
v/as the mission of the Jew. And all this, carried 
still higher in the teachings of the New Testament, 
and purified still further from national and tempo- 
rary limitations, passed over into Christianity. 

But Christianity from the beginning was only 
half Jewish. Side by side with this Jewish element 
there came in an element quite foreign to He- 
brew life and thought. No Greek ever bowed his 
knee to the moral law, nor deified conscience and 
set it upon the throne of the universe. He loved 
strength, beauty, imagination, wisdom, and all the 
powers of the natural man. The highest product of 
Judea was the prophet and the saint. The highest 
product of Greece was the philosopher and the poet. 
Early Christianity, half Jewish and half Greek, com- 
bined these two strains, and set up her ideal of 
morality and intelligence, sainthood and wisdom. 

Then came down into this Christian civilization, 
half Jewish and half Greek, the peoples of Northern 
Europe. No saints were they, though they had their 
own gods. No philosophers certainly ; and no ar- 
tists, though they had a rude poetry of their own. 
But one thing they brought with them to which 
both Jev.' and Greek had been strangers, — a spirit 
of personal freedom, independence, and honor, of 
disregard for merely personal advantage and con- 
venience, and above all a certain chivalrous attitude 
of man toward woman. Up into the north, farther 
among these Germanic peoples, Christianity spread. 
And by the time that this spirit of these northern 
peoples had crystallized into the institution of chiv- 
alry, the idea of the gentleman had taken its place, 
side by side with the idea of the wise man and the 
saint, in the Christian ideal. And there it stands 
today. 

All this shows in the clearest possible way, how 
being a gentleman is part of being a Christian, 
but how far it is from being all of it. A man may 
be a gentleman but an ignoramus. He lacks the 
Greek infusion. He inherits from Britain but not 
from Athens. Or he may be a gentleman, and yet 
be altogether of the earth earthy; he lacks the Jew- 

34 



THE RELIGION OF A GENTLEMAN 

ish infusion. He inherits from the German forests 
and from the days of chivalry, but not from Judea 
and the age of the prophets. The gentleman, so far 
as he is a gentleman and nothing more, may be said 
to be about one-third of a Christian. 

It is not enough, therefore, for a man to set be- 
fore himself, or for others to set before him, the 
ideal of being a gentleman. This is what he should 
start with. It is not what he should end with. By 
this one path a man may come out at ignor- 
ance, or uselessness, no matter how handsomely he 
carries his shoulders or how politely he tips his hat 
during the journey. Strike out from Christendom, 
as we know it, all that has come down to us from 
Greece and from Judea, and leave only what we 
have received from the North of Europe, and that 
will show you what a picayune affair is the life of a 
modern man whose only ideal is to be a gentleman. 

The modern man should be a gentleman and 
something more. He is the heir of all the ages, not 
merely of one. He should start with this. But he 
should add, 

"Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us Jwell. 
That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before, 
But vaster." 

Start with the gentleman. Then add intelligence 
and morality and you have the Christian. 

On the other hand, it is equally true that the 
Christian ideal with this idea of the gentleman left 
out is one-third gone. And if it is not necessar- 
ily the most valuable one-third, it is certainly the 
most attractive. The Greek philosophers used to 
say that goodness and beauty were identical. If 
that is true, it is often a case of disguised identity. 
Why do we despise the monk of the middle ages? 
Not because he was useless. Nor because he seems 
to us a half demented fanatic. He was often learned 
and laborious, often a saint, and often a wise man. 
We despise him becuse he was dirty and coarse and 
ill-bred, and seems to us to have lacked the first 
instincts and habits of a gentleman. Have you ever 
thought how fast the gospel of Christ would travel, 
if every Christian had the grace and charm that we 
always imagine that Christ had? The best adver- 
tisement of the Chrisian religion, and the best proof 
of its truth and power, is the cultivated, intelligent 
Christian gentleman. 

Now, finally, we go a little deeper than this. 

35 



THE RELIGION OF A GENTLEMAN 

When you get it at its best, Christianity is pre- 
eminently the religion of the gentleman. Every 
man who thinks at all acknowledges the presence 
in our world of some ultimate reality. The thing 
that shows what kind of man he is, is his bearing in 
the presence of this reality. Beyond all things that 
we see and touch, beyond the reach of time and 
change, there is a power, or life, or spirit, from 
which all things have come and in which all things 
perpetually dwell. 

Now there are various attitudes that a man may 
take toward this final reality, which may equally 
entitle him to be called a religious man. He may 
bow his head to it as he does to the storm. He may 
cringe before it, in fear. He may abase himself in 
its presence, and think to win its favor by heaping 
abuse and scorn upon his own head. This is re- 
ligion, but it is not the religion of the gentleman. A 
gentleman must stand like a man, not crawl like a 
sci-pent, even in the presence of his Maker. 

Or, rising above this attitude, a man may desire 
to know this reality, and with all sorts of subtlety 
and persistence may pry into its nature and its pur- 
poses. This also is a religion, and a religion of a 
nobler sort. It is the religion of the philosopher, 
the typical wise man of the ages. But it is not nec- 
essarily the religion of the gentleman. 

But a man may put both these together; he may 
feel hi? smallness in the presence of the Infinite; 
he may be truly humble before the power that over- 
masters him and that he cannot fathom; he may 
inquire v>;ith all the energy of his soul into the 
meaning of the mysteries by which he is surrounded, 
peer into the darkness as far as he can see, and 
carry his little candle as far as he can out into the 
corners; and then beyond all this he may stand 
erect and self-respecting; he may know himself to 
be of one substance with this ultimate and infinite 
spirit, and feel in his own heart the dignity that be- 
longs to a child of the eternal ; he may carry himself 
with deference, with self-control and with an assur- 
ance that nothing can shake, in the presence of God, 
and by word and deed make himself worthy of the 
respect that God has for him; — no superstition, be- 
cause he knows; no fear, because he loves; no dis- 
honoring or false humiliation of himself, because he 
is a child of the Infinite ; but always a quiet dignity, 
a confidence unshaken, and a serenity that nothing 
can disturb ; this is the religion of a gentleman. And 
this is Christianity. 



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